Microsoft has said on several occasions recently that they're planning to increase their first party offering on Xbox One after getting hit by criticism for their lack of exclusive games compared to both Nintendo and Sony. However, there's the slight problem that big games take a long time to develop these days. Titles spending at least three years in development is not uncommon for bigger games nowadays, which means that even if a new exclusive project would start today, it might not get finished until 2021.
This has led to a plethora of rumours about acquisitions, which would be a much faster way of getting studios, game brands, and hopefully nearly-finished games. The current Microsoft boss, Nadella Satya, seems way more interested in games than his predecessor Steve Ballmer, after all, and he did greenlight the enormous takeover of Mojang that saw MS snap up Minecraft. Now Polygon has run a report about this state of affairs, and they have a couple of juicy rumours about acquisitions they've heard sources talking about, and when we say juicy, we mean it.
Polygon claims they've heard suggestions that Microsoft might be interested in buying giants like EA, Valve, and/or PUBG Corp. The first two would be completely unprecedented in the world of video games, with EA having all their sports games, Star Wars, Battlefield, and Bioware as well as their service Origin. Valve, on the other hand, has games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Dota 2, although more importantly, they have Steam, the platform which is currently dominating digital video game sales for PC.
PUBG Corp is by far the smallest of the companies mentioned, but still has the most popular game at the moment - PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - and that acquisition would, in a stroke, grant Microsoft the exclusive rights to it.
None of these rumours sound very plausible, so take this with a hefty pinch of salt. However, Microsoft does have the resources to make a deal like this happen, and given their relative lack of first-party exclusives, snapping up a successful third-party publisher does make sense.
Which publishers or studios do you think would be a good fit for Microsoft and Xbox?